On one hand, Michael Saylor says never (ever) sell your Bitcoin. Jack Mallers wants you to be able spend it at every store in the United States. What are we to make of it?
Covered:
- To Spend or Never Spend?
- Meant to be Spent?
To Spend or Never Spend?
What is Bitcoin to you? Is it a world reserve currency meant to replace the dollar? Will oil and other commodities be price in Sats? Or is like Gold? Meant to hold and store your wealth? None of these are mutually exclusive, per se. However, there is a glaring divergence in what Bitcoin “should be” when you listen to some of the most influential people in crypto, including Jack Mallers and Michael Saylor.
Jack Mallers: “spend your #bitcoin”
Michael Saylor: “never sell your #bitcoin”
So who’s right?
— Gideon Heilpern (@gideonheilpern2) April 8, 2022
It can be perplexing when on one hand, Jack Mallers takes the stage at Bitcoin 2022 and announces his intention to bring Bitcoin to every merchant possible, and then Michael Saylor saying at the same conference, “never spend your Bitcoin.” There are many that believe it is absurd to imagine global adoption of Bitcoin but posit it as something which you never spend. “Digital real estate in Manhattan,” as Saylor calls Bitcoin, doesn’t jive with a day-to-day currency Mallers wishes to implement it as.
I don’t want to spend my BTC either (yet), but the mere fact that it’s directly or indirectly accepted by more vendors in more countries, makes that BTC more useful to own, and increases the network’s practical permissionless payment capability.
TrendingGameStop’s Future Is Tied To Ethereum NFTs— Lyn Alden (@LynAldenContact) April 7, 2022
This “never spend” mantra is conflicting, to say the least. Most ardent bitcoiners imagine a world without fiat, but don’t want to spend their sats. There is also the issue with bitcoin being deemed property, and so every time you spend it, you incur a taxable event in the United States. Mallers and Strike have apparently got around this, though. What they have done is made the transactions go from dollars to bitcoin to dollars. This basically means bitcoin “payment rails” are being used more than bitcoin itself.
The trick in the US for now to simplify things is to use Strike and pay over lightning from your dollar balance. You send dollars, merchant receives dollars, bitcoin lightning transfers and settles the value. Fuck the banks and card processors.
— Corndalorian⚡️ (@corndalorian) April 7, 2022
Meant to be Spent?
Maybe the simple answer is bitcoin can have different value to different people. Some want to spend it some want to save it. On its face, nothing seems wrong with that. It is just the stark contrast in Saylor saying never spend it versus Mallers pushing global merchant adoption which is peculiar. What seems to be true is that with Mallers pushing the “payment rails” of Lightning, Bitcoin becomes more useful, and the entire network becomes stronger and more resilient. Maybe the Strike announcement is more nuanced then “spend bitcoin.
Pretty sure you can just load USD into strike and pay USD using BTC rails and settle without multiple middlemen.
You don’t have to spend the bitcoin. You just use the LN rails to transaction and Layer 1 to settle.
The point is to disrupt old technology, not spend BTC.
— Dr. Hippocrates MD (@DrHippocratesMD) April 7, 2022
It seems more people are in the camp that bitcoin should be “used” and shouldn’t sit dormant in cold storage. Saylor compares real estate to bitcoin, but people use real estate. You cannot live in a bitcoin. Jack Dorsey is definitely on the Mallers side of things. “Get paid in Bitcoin” recently went live on Cash App and he is quoted often as saying that “Bitcoin will be the single currency of the internet in the near future”. Elon Musk first announced Bitcoin for Tesla’s back in 2021, that’s spending. Lastly, and most importantly, take a second to think about what Satoshi envisioned. What is the first sentence of the Bitcoin Whitepaper?
“A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” Think of the words “cash” and “payments.” It sure sounds like Satoshi was on the “spend your bitcoin” side. If Saylor doesn’t believe Bitcoin can scale for global payments, he should say so.
It is clear that scaling Bitcoin for this purpose is monumentally difficult. More middlemen, like Strike, a custodial, KYC’d service, often get created to make this happen. That’s clearly undesirable, and not “peer-to-peer.” “Routing payments via Lightning over Tor” and merchants running a full node to mitigate this, is absurd.
you must KYC to use strike, sorry.
— Craig Murray (@CraigM1024) April 8, 2022
Also, the problem is, no one really spends Bitcoin day-to-day in the United States. In the old days, Silk road, the major darknet market that shut down in 2014, was using bitcoin, and so was Wikileaks for donations. Other darknet markets are to this point still used more than, say, Bitcoin for coffee in Charlotte. For example, the largest darknet market was just shut down last week and was doing billions worth of bitcoin per year.
Clearly, bitcoin was meant to be spent. Satoshi called it digital cash after all, not digital gold. That is important to remember.
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